SAFEGROWTH® BLOG

Prisons are filled with young men. Make more arrests and prisons will fill up with them. Last blog David Kennedy's new book Don't Shoot described his anti-gang/drug dealer programs (gangs comprising, at least initially, young men).

Why young men?

Philip Zimbardo is one of my favorite living psychologists. He makes simple the complex world of behavioral research. He's no intellectual slouch - Stanford professor, author of the PBS film Discovering Psychology, former chair of the American Psychology Association.

In his latest TED talk last month he says growing numbers of young men are joining the military, watching TV sports, obsessing on events like Superbowl Sunday, and hanging out with each other in pubs. Of course men have always done that, just not to such an extent.

Ironically, for all their macho bluster about women, Zimbardo says young guys end up preferring male bonding to female mating. He thinks excessive video gaming, Internet porning, and explicitly male media obsessions are a major reason why.

I'm unsure how much of this holds up to evidence. I’m unsure how many of those Millennial malcontents end up in gangs or doing crime.

I am sure his TED.com talk called The Demise of Guys is well worth 5 minutes of your time to find out.

Street drug dealing and gang violence isn't the only neighborhood crime problem. But it's at the top of the list.

I met David Kennedy a few years ago and liked him immediately. He's a professor at New York's John Jay College. He has no PhD or MA, yet today he is a leading voice in crime prevention policy. When he speaks about drug dealers and gang violence, people listen. I certainly do. Every time I've seen him he strikes me as the smartest guy in the room.

The New Yorker says he's onto something. Newsweek magazine says he is the only person "who has ever come up with a consistently viable and cost-effective strategy for helping the inner city" drug and gang problems.

If you don't know David's work on Boston's Cease Fire anti-gang project or the High Point, NC, drug dealer project, then you need to get caught up. No better way than to read his latest book -Don't Shoot.

I haven't read it yet but David is one of the few people whose book I can recommend before I have.

Malcolm Gladwell, of Tipping Point fame, says: "Don't Shoot will do for the fight against violence what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did for the environmental movement a generation ago".

I just came across a Wall Street Journal article debunking a poverty and crime theory called "blocked opportunities". Puh-leese! For op-ed writers, debunking crime theories is like stealing lolipops from tots. Simple, unethical and just silly.

Some claim routine activity goes beyond street corners to whole countries. They predict Western countries have more goods, more cash for illicit drugs, more things to steal, and will therefore have larger criminal opportunities. This results in higher crime rates than in poorer countries. Voila: poverty doesn't cause crime - routine activities do. The International Crime Victimization Survey, they say, proves it.

It doesn't.

Why? Because that is a logic error called the non sequitur. Consider this:

I constructed this graph from that same survey. It shows the US homicide rate plummeting throughout the 1990s. Canada's rate dips slightly. In the UK, where the Crime and Disorder Act has been in place for the entire period, homicide flatlines and then slightly increases.

You could say this is because crime opportunities between the three countries is worse in the UK. That is unlikely. The US has more gangs, drugs, guns and plenty of crime opportunities.

It is more likely routine activity theory just breaks down at this scale and predicts nothing.

Preventing crime and building safe communities is what counts. SafeGrowth is all those things. What happens if, in spite of best efforts, your home is burgled or a family member suffers violence?

What then?

Most people want payback. Mistaken for justice, it's really eye-for-an-eye, what the ancient Babylonians called vengeful retribution. Gandhi was fond of saying an eye-for-an-eye leaves everyone blind.

What do we actually get? The offender is removed from the community, tried, sentenced, and sanctioned (or not). Little, if anything, is actually returned (restored) to the community. Victims rarely feel satisfied. Without some kind of restoration, the offender eventually gets out of prison often worse than when he or she went in. That's the dilemma.

RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

Restorative justice (RJ) answers this dilemma. It still removes violent offenders so they cannot harm others. But RJ expects offenders to repair the harm they've caused. It provides a chance for the neighborhood and victims to participate in resolving the harm. It helps restore victims and offenders back to a more healthy and positive life.

The RJ story is best told by Liz Elliott, especially her YouTube story about the 3 lies gangs tell. Watch it HERE. Also, check out her recent book, Security, With Care.

RJ expert, Liz Elliott

Disclosure: Liz is a friend from a long time ago. She became an award-winning criminologist specializing in RJ. We were students in the same criminology program. Back then PhD students occasionally hung out and shared stories.

One afternoon, boating up the Fraser River with a bunch of other grad students, I remember being impressed by the ethics of Liz's stories. At a time when my own academic experience thirsted for examples of integrity, her stories showed me what moving forward should look like. We might have been on water, but her values were so well grounded.

She built an academic career on that ethical ground. A quote in Secure reads "the idea is to become more competent and engaged as citizens in our homes and communities, so that we need to rely less on formal government institutions to address our problems." Exactly right Liz, that's it!

None of that seems to have mattered. Victoria still reeks of graffiti tags like some biblical plague of locusts.

True, there are much bigger cities with more tags. There are also more troubled cities where gangs tag their hood like medieval warlords claiming turf, what Atlas calls "offensive space". Victoria is none of that, which in my mind makes it so inexcusable.

Victoria is a mid-sized, world-class city with booming tourism. It has high quality-of-life, good schools, and spectacular natural scenery.

Victoria also suffers persistent and pervasive tagging far beyond what I've seen in other cities of similar size. I'm not speaking of street art that the BC Graffiti website calls "momentary pockets of expression".

I'm not describing political graffiti that might make the odd alley risqué - even bohemian.

Tagging shops on the main commercial street

I'm talking about butt-ugly paint-spray for no reason but vandalism. Case in point: the underground BC Graffiti website has 54 graf photos from cities across the province - 39 are from Victoria (to be fair, those pics show much higher quality graffiti than I saw the past few days). Obviously in graf-writer world, Victoria is still Queen.

Why doesn't Victoria regulate the sale of paint-spray cans as elsewhere? Should we blame the catch-and-release British Columbia court system? The lack of restorative justice opportunities? Do we blame the decline of problem-oriented policing training there?

Victoria cannot be blamed for a lack of trying. The national anti-graffiti "Tags" conference ran here in 2009 (sadly, and obviously, to no avail). Conference lessons either didn't work or fell on deaf ears.

SafeGrowth is a people-based planning method for creating 21st Century neighborhoods of imagination, livability, and safety. It develops new relationships between city government and residents in order to prevent crime and plan for the future. While technology and evidence-based practice plays a role, SafeGrowth is based on community building through annual SafeGrowth plans and neighborhood problem-solving teams networked throughout the city.​